Turn a sales question into a chart inside the workbook
At a glance
A spreadsheet user uses Excel's Analyze Data to ask about sales and insert the resulting visual without building formulas. This workflow is listed under Sales, Spreadsheets, Office Admin.
- Agents / tools
- Microsoft Excel, Analyze Data
SourceBuilding a tool for these workflows? See weekly rates.
What they did
1) Open the sales data in an up-to-date Microsoft 365 version of Excel with Analyze Data available. Use a supported workbook format such as XLSX, organize the data under one row of unique nonblank headers, remove merged cells, and format the range as a table with Ctrl+T on Windows. 2) Select a cell in the table and choose Home, then Analyze Data. 3) Ask a specific question in the pane's query box, such as a request for sales totals by year, and press Enter. If the recommendations are too broad, select Which fields interest you the most, choose the fields, and specify their aggregation. 4) Review the returned table, chart, or PivotTable and insert the useful result into the workbook. Save the workbook with the selected analysis.
Worth knowing
Analyze Data does not support XLS compatibility mode or datasets above 1.5 million cells. Text-formatted dates need conversion before date analysis.
